Second Language Learners' Development in Control Over Tense from a Discourse Perspective.

Second language learners' development of tense generally has been investigated from the morphological or sentence-level perspective and generally in relation to sentence-level data. This study, in contrast, relates learners' performance in tense to the distribution of information in a text and to elements of language processing in the actual production of a text. Data for the study include oral narratives and evaluations of a mostly non-dialogue film by twenty adult native speakers of Spanish and Japanese at different levels of English proficiency and by four native speakers of English. Native-speaking (NS) subjects maintained tense highly consistently in both narrative and nonnarrative texts. Most deviations from the on-going tense were referentially based, but those which were not were found to be influenced by environments of processing complexity. Non-native-speaking (NNS) subjects produced relatively few tense form errors. Analysis of individual subjects' texts showed developmental patterns in the disuse and use of past tense. At beginning levels, disuse of tense reflected lack of attempt to use past tense. At more intermediate levels, subjects used past tense selectively, marking verbs for past tense primarily when relating narrative events. Subjects at more advanced levels used past tense in both narrative and nonnarrative clauses. Development was also found in how processing complexity affected the production of tense switch errors. Processing complexity affected tense errors at more beginning and intermediate levels in a general way. Beginning-level subjects tended to reduce processing load either by avoiding tense use or by producing short sentences. Subjects at more intermediate levels had a high rate of tense switch errors whenever high levels of complexity were present. Tense switch errors for subjects at more advanced levels occurred less frequently, but when they did occur, they tended to be in complex environments. NNS subjects demonstrated development in the backgrounding of nonnarrative information into subordinate structures and in the integration of tense use in both narrative and nonnarrative clauses. However, NNS subjects still showed important differences from NS subjects in their use of subordinating and backgrounding and in production processing capabilities.Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160959/1/8612525.pd